I recently had my external HDD that I kept movies on die and when I tried to have the data recovered the tech guy said that regularly accessing files on external HDD's reduced their life span. He obviously tried to upsell me an external media player.
I've never heard of this before, does regularly accessing media on standard external HD's degrade their lifespan? Is it actually better to use an external media player?
I'm sure he is technically right, but that sounds more like a "if you use this thing, it will eventually die" rather than actual advice that is unique to a HDD. I'm not a tech guru, but if you are constantly deleting things from that hard drive, then I believe it does impact the "life span" of the hard drive. As for the media player, unless that media player has a ton of flash memory, wouldn't it also use an HDD or SSD? Why not just buy an SSD instead?
That's more an issue for SSDs than HDDs, I believe. A hard drive is a mechanical system that will fail eventually, but individual memory locations don't have their own write cycle limits.
External hard drive enclosures get hot even while reading, but especially writing, so using them regularly will actually decrease the life a lot.
Get an external enclosure with a fan that actually blows air and the hdd in it will last forever no matter what you do to it. Good ventilation or an open one is okay, but hdd can get hot even with just convection cooling it.
They were just small external HDD's that did get hot and were moved a lot, so I'm assuming it was just normal wear and tear.
I was definitely leaning towards replacing with another normal drive anyway.